Große Freiheit – Great Freedom – the street was called. They played the Kaiserkeller eight days a week. And I read somewhere that this was how they honed their craft. They were kept in constant training because there was plenty of competition. Entry was free and people were quick to leave if they got bored. There was a strip club next door, so it was probably a rivalry with sex that brought all those tunes into the world. That’s the secret of the Beatles. You could probably say the same about Shakespeare and the tons of genius he left for us to enjoy. While he didn’t have striptease to compete with, there were all those bear and dog fights in the next building. And to think people say that sex and violence are the enemies of art.
12
Beatles Party in Hamburg
1960
It was through this company of Astrid and my fellow lodgers that by a stroke of luck I tagged along to a party with these conquerors of the age. It was an extraordinary moment for an Icelandic girl, of course, though it could all have ended differently.
Astrid had started going out with the extra Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe, his name was, a shy and sensitive art student whom John, the rascal, bullied, always making fun of his clothes and stage appearance. After one of the concerts, Astrid invited us all back to her place. In those days the Fab Four were five in number, and of course it was a real adventure to stroll along the Reeperbahn with them, the famous haunt of prick-teasing hookers, adorned with windmills and red lights. John was clearly the leader of the group. He did all the talking, asking the hookers if they were tired and wanted to come to a party, he would pay them the same as they’d get for the other thing. On the way there, John also made fun of Astrid’s German accent and the street names we saw, but we girls just laughed as we were expected to in those years, and I probably laughed the loudest: he gave me the glad eye.
Astrid was a Twiggy clone. She had painted her room black, white and silver and hung twigs with no leaves from the ceiling. It was on the verge of what I could tolerate by way of pretentiousness. But there were drinks and music. Old Platters records, I remember, and Nat King Cole. Lennon asked our hostess if she had inherited her record collection from her grandfather. I detected a certain tension between him and Astrid, and most probably his teasing of Stuart, whom he sometimes called Shutcliff or Stuffclit, was inspired by jealousy. As the Beatle stooped, sputtering over the record collection, I saw my chance and told them I’d been to the States. I asked him if he knew Buddy Holly, because with all that Brilliantine, that was who he reminded me of. ‘Buddy Holly’ turned out to be the magic words, because now John began to ply me with questions about the singer, of whom I knew nothing except that he was dead. But the ice was broken, and soon John and I were dancing together, although they said he never danced. Someone turned the lights out, the Platters sang as we danced cheek to cheek, and before long a Breidafjördur girl received a Beatles kiss.
It was only later that I realised this was a momentous event in Icelandic history, albeit of the kind that wasn’t supposed to be mentioned. I could picture it in our tabloids: british beatle kissed in hamburg. At the same time it was such a trivial one that it was hardly worth reporting. One dance, one kiss. I guess I felt like the girl who kissed Jesus before he had his first big breakthrough and who bore her fate in silence, even after her relatives began to worship him as a god. My last husband, Bæring, wanted me to tell the local rag or some other tabloid about this kiss, thought it was pretty remarkable, but I refused to, even after John’s death. I found it too ‘glitzy,’ as Mum would have said.
But I do keep him in my collection of Jóns, as the Peace-Jón, though I later read that he was no angel of peace. He himself admitted that all his great efforts for peace were due to inner conflicts and even confessed that he had assaulted women. That’s what they’re like, those visionaries: always got something simmering on the stove back home.
But even though he was young, he already had a sailor’s salty humour radiating self-confidence and, of course, that magic charm. Was a wonderful kisser, asked me if the British would beat the Germans in a kissing war, and was amazed when I told him I was Icelandic.
‘Oh? So that’s why I’m so cold.’
‘Are you cold?’
‘No.’ He grinned. ‘I’m from Iceland, too.’
‘Huh? From Iceland?’
‘Yeah, that’s what Mimi calls my bedroom, Iceland.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s always so cold. The windows are always open.’
‘Why?’
‘Smoke gets in your eyes,’ he answered, singing the Platters song we’d just danced to. ‘Mimi doesn’t want me to smoke.’
‘Who’s Mimi?’
‘My aunt. Or my mum. Mum died in a car accident. Got run over by a drunk.’
‘Oh? How awful.’
‘Yeah. I’ve yet to kill him.’
To my surprise, this sentence imploded like a bomb in my soul. Everything went dark, my eyes filled with tears, and I excused myself, went out to the balcony, gripped the ice-cold railing, and looked out over the buildings and river. I wasn’t going to start crying in front of those youngsters. He cautiously poked his head out to the narrow balcony.
‘What happened? Did I say something…?’
I turned towards him.
‘No, no, I… it’s… I also lost… in the same kind of…’
‘Your mum?’
‘No, little… little…’
‘Sister?’
I couldn’t answer. Just shook my head. It was still so incredibly painful. It is still so incredibly painful. I thought that, bit by bit, I would have got over losing my daughter to that car, but there I was, seven years later, and I still couldn’t even hear a car accident mentioned. And here I lie, fifty-six years later, dabbing a solitary tear on my wrinkled cheek. But what a stroke of bad luck, getting a lump in my throat in front of that boy, precisely on that night. He behaved well, but our ‘exchange’ was obviously over. Young men don’t go to bed with old problems.
‘You mean… a child?’
I nodded, swallowed, and tried to smile away the tears. Through the music you could hear the screech of a train in the darkness of the night. The Beatle grinned back, finally stepped onto the balcony, lit a cigarette, and, as he was exhaling the smoke, said, ‘You’re a lot older than me, aren’t you? How old are you?’
To my surprise I found his brashness refreshing. I asked for a cigarette and recovered my speech.
‘You… you don’t ask a lady her age. Aren’t you a gentleman?’
‘No, I’m from Woolton, how old are you?’
‘Thirty-one; and you?’
‘Twenty.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll be thirty later this year.’
There was a lot of truth in that, since that was the start of a decade that flew by faster than any other decade of the twentieth century. I watched him open the balcony door, which was really just a large window, return to the cheerful atmosphere of the party, and then grow into the long-haired world-famous ex-Beatle who had rewritten the musical history of the age and taken half the world with him into hippiedom, in a bed in Amsterdam.